Saturday, December 3, 2016

One year on 60m

Remember exactly one year ago I was one of the first stations from the Netherlands legally on 60m. Those first days were great and every station was DX. I've been more active on 60m lately if time allows but it is hard to work any new ones. Most DX is very very early in the morning when I am sleeping. Oh yes, a real DXer would be on the frequency to work the new ones so I guess I'm not a real one then ;-). 60m DX seems to be a challenge and is not so easy although more and more countries are allowed to be on 5Mhz. Most of the DX is playing at 5.357MHz JT65. So far I worked 27 DXCC countries which are (sorted by countryname):


Not shure if all contacts are legal. As far as I know 60m is not allowed in Italy and Ukraine though they are contacted and in my log, change of rules can be fast and there is probabely a special license for experimental reasons possible?
The dutch telecom agency was too generous to us here in the Netherlands allowing us 100W on 100KHz. Since the WRC-15 (World Radiocommunication Conference) dutch telecom decided the rules will change to the region 1 uniformity of 15W on 15KHz (5351,5-5366,5KHz). That doesn't necessarily means less DX as 15W proves to be enough to get your signal around the world on this band. You don't believe that? Well, my signal has been received by VK7BO (Tasmania, Australia) on 60m JT65 and I was transmitting with 15W.

From the WRC-15 provisional final acts we can read:

Read: MOBILE except aeronautical mobile. That means that my QSO with PH9HB/AM was unique and will never legally happen again anymore when rules are changed. So far so good, if Jeroen will be active on 60m this end of the year you can still make a unique QSO of course! So keep your eyes and ears open on the frequencies you can still use at least in 2016. There might be contacts possible that can't be made when we are limited to the WRC-15 60m allocation. Not that it is a matter of propagation or power, difference in worldwide rules could be a barrier.


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